Hey ya, been a while huh.

  For those of you who DM'd wishing me luck on my deployment and for all the kind comments about my hiatus/departure, thank you.

  TLDR:

  Deployment long. No writing done. I'm back. I'm rewriting the story to fix issues. There's no time frame. I'm mentally exhausted, so I chill and write when I feel good about it, which hasn't really happened in the past year.

  Less TLDR:

  The deployment has been over for about 3 months at this point, and I've been home since. Not gonna lie, i have not written a single fucking word in those three months. I've essentially done nothing in those three months other than rest, go back to a regular gym routine, get some problems fixed/solved in my personal life, and play the absolute hell out of the excellent titles that have come out since February. (Monster Hunter, Kingdom Come, etc. You get the picture.)

  Now, while on that deployment as mentioned in the previous update, I also have not written anything really, and I've read A LOT of books, including my own work, and reading all that was amazing. Through that process I've noticed a lot of the massive errors I've done while writing Winds of Destiny, and one of the few reasons why this has taken me so long to come back to/update you all as I was stuck in this loop of "I wanna continue" and "But i've made so many mistakes so i either drop or rewrite".

  But for now, I chose the rewrite, and a heavy one at that. I want it to morph into my vision when I started writing this a couple of years back, rather than what it became once I put words to paper. Now, keep in mind that at first, I had only planned to write 15-20 chapters and probably never make this reach anyone other than myself. So, planning was never really done to begin with.

  To point out a few reasons/mistakes so you know what to expect:

  Characterization is basically non-existent for almost all side characters and barely present for Tyler himself. There is just way too much info dumping to give these characters a distinct personality and feel.

  - More dialogs needed, and interaction with the world rather than info-dumping it all as the narrator.

  The pace of progression felt incredibly fast while re-reading, to the point that it made it feel unearned and just "Oh, strong old soul = win." This isn't bad, as it accelerates the start and allows me to get to the bigger world faster, but it wasn't done particularly well.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  - Slow everything down, completely overhaul the first two arcs. A lot more action-focused.

  Due to the above pacing, most areas I've dreamed up/built up are unused and, well, meaningless. Don't get me wrong, I do 1000% expect that the starting village (so to speak) ends up useless on like book 2-3 onwards, just not one of the main capitals that seemed so Giant and lived in (Sword King Mountain and the whole island). I do still have plans for that moving forward, but the separation from that felt rushed and not done well.

  I was also annoyed when I was re-reading how some of the greater parts of the world/conflict were just POV switched for no obvious reasons. It was alright in places like chapter 50, where you get the PoV of the "enemy" who gets wiped out without even a breeze being felt. But even that was a bit too short and lacking depth. I feel like some of those should happen in the background, and the reader should find out alongside Tyler rather than expect specific reactions from the information you get versus the information he got. It made everything feel off/weird.

  Also, you'll definitely see similarities over the span of book 1, but it *should* feel like a different take/approach that doesn't feel rushed. Like, why did I think it was a good idea to make the big boss interact with Tyler from the get-go? I'm not exactly sure. It felt cool, but it's off-putting, lol.

  With that out of the way, let me be clear, this won't be released any time soon as I've just started (yesterday) to plan this re-write. I had flirted with the idea of something new altogether, as that's fun and cool and what not, but.... nah. I wanna finish this.. Eventually. That, and dropping this entirely would've made me feel really bad about ya'll who keep asking me when I come back to writing this (And my perpetual problem of never finishing anything i start)!

  When it does launch, book 1 will be done on my end so it can launch at a steady pace until completion, and then it'll go on hiatus on book 2 is complete. Rinse and repeat from there.

  The reason behind this? I've realized that spending 6 hours a night writing/editing/publishing and managing discords, comments, etc was way too much work when I'm at work from 06:30 (Gym time) to like 15:30. I still want to be able to have a life, which was basically non-existent when i launched this originally. So ya'll might not see a decrease of volume over the course of a book being "done", but expect heavy down times between books.

  Oh and I will totally release it under a different Title. Winds of Destiny is way too common/corny!

  See ya in a while on a different Fic; this will remain tagged as dropped until the re-write is done and released under a different Fiction. :)